Making Molasses Candy

Thursday, February 7th, 2019 at 9:33 pm

Tirzah Mae has been begging me to make molasses candy since we first read Little House in the Big Woods last year.

We just re-read the Christmas chapter again today and this time I was ready. After rest time, we would make molasses candy.

We don’t have snow here in Wichita right now, so I whizzed up some ice cubes into a very respectable snow using my immersion blender. I put the snow back into the freezer.

I called Tirzah Mae into the room and kept her busy stirring molasses and sugar while I prepared the baked beans for supper.

I deemed the syrup hot enough and poured it over the snow.

It wasn’t hot enough. I really need to get myself a candy thermometer (I must have broken my last one, because it’s nowhere to be found.)

Our molasses candy was a gooey mess.

What’s more, it tastes like… well, like… molasses.

[Gasp!]

Louis spit his piece onto the helping tower, where it melted into slime.

I scraped up the rest (the stuff that was on the snow, not the stuff that had been in Louis’s mouth) and stuck it in a patty pan in the freezer – maybe I’ll see if the kids are willing to try it again, or maybe I’ll use it as a sweetener for something else.

So even if our molasses candy experiment was less than satisfying, it does pay to keep on trying the things we read about in books – occasionally we end up with keepers (I make Mother Wilder’s baked beans at least every couple of months!)